The Facts About Supermarket Soft Plastic Recycling

UPDATE 23 June 2017:

I am very pleased to announce that Red Group is now collecting soft plastic for recycling through the Red Cycle Program in Gippsland Coles stores. The participating Coles stores include: Warragul, Moe, Morwell, Traralgon, Sale, Bairnsdale and Wonthaggi. Please read the original article below to know more about what can be recycled and how, and also to know what happens to the soft plastic at Coles and Woolworths stores not participating in Red Cycle.

Original Article:

Currently, there are no supermarkets in Gippsland collecting soft plastic like shopping bags, bread bags, chip packets and frozen pea bags for recycling through the REDcycle program. Some of you wouldn’t have known soft plastic was recyclable until now, but many of you will be ready to tell me I’m wrong. After all, a reliable source told you about it and you’ve seen or used the collection bins yourself. But, due to some misinformation I noticed spreading through the region I decided to get the facts from the companies involved and I uncovered some interesting things. Plus, I have some good news to share and there’s still a way to recycle soft plastic so it doesn’t end up in landfill.

Who recycles soft plastic and why doesn’t it occur in Gippsland?

Firstly, most councils can’t accept soft plastic for recycling via their kerbside collection because the soft plastic jams the automated sorting machines at the Materials Recovery Facility. This is the case for all Gippsland Shires and that’s why you may have been advised to put soft plastic in your landfill bin. As a side note, neighbouring Cardinia Shire Council does accept some soft plastic in the kerbside recycling bins, read more here.

In 2011, RED Group launched the REDcycle program in Melbourne Coles and Woolworths stores which invites consumers to return all their soft plastic for recycling. Since then they have spread to 630 participating Coles and Woolworths supermarkets (not IGA or any other supermarkets) around Australia, but none as yet in Gippsland. The closest participating stores for Gippslanders are in Pakenham. Anyone can use the REDcycle Store Locator to find their closest drop off point.

RED Group collects the soft plastic from participating supermarkets for processing and delivery to Victorian manufacturer, Replas, where it’s used to make recycled-plastic products such as bollards, signage, fitness circuits and sturdy outdoor furniture suitable for use in schools, parks, public spaces and commercial premises.

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The reason REDcycle hasn’t expanded to Gippsland is because the business is still small and needs to be measured in its approach to expansion to ensure the program can continue to thrive. RED Group needs to be careful they don’t end up with too much plastic in stockpiles that can’t be used by Replas. The cost of collecting material from rural areas is also prohibitive, but most importantly there needs to be demand for the end product. Someone has to use the recycled plastic bollards and furniture. The more people that use the end product, the more waste plastic can be collected and recycled. Replas’ video, The Pull Through Effect, explains this well. So up until this point, it hasn’t been viable to collect soft plastic from Gippsland.

Great news from Coles and REDcycle

Coles and REDcycle told me that due to the Gippsland Unwrapped community and other passionate individuals making it known they want to be able to recycle soft plastic, they have begun assessing the viability of collecting from Gippsland. They are keen to make this happen and their assessment will be completed in the next few weeks. I will share the outcome with you. Congratulations everyone for once again proving that individual actions do make a difference.

Exactly which plastics am I talking about?

The following items can be recycled via the REDcycle Program:

Bread, pasta & rice bags

Cereal box liners

Biscuit packets

Frozen food bags

Ice cream wrappers

Squeeze pouches

Plastic sachets

Bubble wrap

Chocolate & muesli bar wrappers

Silver-lined chip & cracker packets

Confectionery bags

Fresh produce bags

Netting citrus bags

Polypropylene bags

Plastic film from grocery items like nappies and toilet paper

Australia Post satchels

Newspaper wrap

Sturdy pet food bags

Large sheets of plastic that furniture comes wrapped in (cut into pieces the size of an A3 sheet of paper first)

RED Group says “If the plastic CAN be scrunched into a ball in your hand (and it doesn’t immediately spring back into its original shape when you release your hand), it can be placed in a REDcycle Program drop off bin. If it CAN’T be scrunched, it should be recycled at home via your kerbside collection.”

Not all packaging able to be ‘REDcycled’ has the logo but some brands do.

More good news: what you can do with your soft plastic in the meantime

Even though the REDcycle Program isn’t yet operating in Gippsland, you may be able to get to one of the drop off points at some stage, so save any soft plastic you have been unable to avoid to do this.

If you can’t get to one of the drop off points, then you can post your plastic to: 38 Chelmsford Street, Williamstown North VIC 3016. It is not a free postal service because the reality is that used post-consumer plastic has very little value, particularly when the price of oil is low, and REDcycle still needs to allocate resources to processing the material before it is delivered to Replas.

Tips for suppling REDcycle with your soft plastic:

Packaging should be ‘empty and dry’ but a limited amount of contamination can be tolerated.

Cut large pieces of bubble wrap into smaller pieces about the size of an A3 sheet of paper.

It’s fine to bundle up all your unwanted single use shopping bags and packaging in another bag and tie it up, before placing in a REDcycle Program drop off bin. They don’t need to be loose like your council’s rigid plastic kerbside recycling needs to be. This is because the sorting processes are different.

You don’t need to peel off small paper labels, but you should take off those bigger than A5 size.

There’s no need to cut rigid plastic spouts and lids off squeeze pouches.

Don’t include rigid biscuit trays, only the soft wrapper.

Don’t include degradable, compostable, or bio degradable bags. Bags that are labelled degradable or compostable have been specifically manufactured to break down in the general waste stream. They can’t be used because they will degrade before being processed.

What else can you do?

The most important thing you can do to ensure soft plastic recycling reaches Gippsland is use the end product yourself or lobby others like schools and councils to use it. Some of the benefits for councils are that the REDcycle program creates a solution to waste that they don’t have to pay for, and the end products are environmentally sound, lasting 50 years instead of just two years, which will reduce maintenance and replacement costs.

So, what’s happening to the soft plastic being dropped off in supermarket recycle bins across Gippsland?

That’s a question that has taken me weeks of investigating. Coles was first to respond with this information:

“We can confirm this plastic [from Gippsland Coles stores] would be used by Visy in their gasifier to power their recycling plant.”

Simplistically, this means Visy burn the plastic to create energy. In the waste industry this process is known as ‘waste-to-energy’ or ‘energy recovery’.

Woolworths also eventually confirmed that their soft plastic material goes to Visy:

“What happens with our plastic bags is that they are bundled with the plastic film our stores accumulate (i.e. when delivery palettes arrive they are wrapped in flexible plastic film) so all of that material goes to Visy.”

When asked what happens to the plastic after that, staff said it is recycled by Visy but when asked about how and what it is recycled into, I was told no more information would be shared. Until I get this information, I will have doubts about it being recycled because I can’t find anything online about Visy recycling soft plastic, only saying not to recycle it, and why wouldn’t a company want to share a recycling story with the public. Very strange. I will update my post if I ever find out what it is recycled into. In my attempts to be absolutely thorough, I also pursued comment from Visy via phone and email and was provided with this statement:

“Visy is not in a position to provide you with the information you have requested, as Visy cannot comment publicly regarding its commercial arrangements with its customers. If you require further detail regarding your inquiry please speak directly with the companies involved.”

But what about the other supermarkets? Someone once told me their IGA Supermarket collected soft plastic for recycling so I called almost half the stores across Gippsland (because they are all independently owned and operated) to find out. Those stores were: Bairnsdale, Churchill, Korumburra, Leongatha, Mallacoota, Neerim South, Poowong, Sale, San Remo, Traralgon, Wonthaggi. I found Korumburra and Leongatha to be the only ones collecting soft plastic from customers. I was told by those staff that the plastic went to Visy.

Recycling is better than recovery of energy, but refusing is best

On the surface, recovery of energy (waste-to-energy) sounds good because it is a shift away from landfill, but it is contested technology and it is still combustion which destroys the resources for good. Recycling (processing waste materials to make the same or different products) is the preferred option because it keeps materials in the productive economy and benefits the environment by decreasing the need for new materials and waste absorption. Recovering energy from materials may be a better option than landfill when further recycling is not possible. However, refusing and reducing the generation of waste in the first place needs to be the highest priority for community, industry and government to reduce the amount of virgin materials extracted and used. To be more sustainable we must get better at avoiding unnecessary consumption and being more efficient with our resources. It’s a bit like managing our health, prevention is better than cure.

The waste management hierarchy (from EPA Victoria)

I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially if you have additional information to share about any topic covered in this post.

Thank you RED Group, Replas, Coles, IGA, Woolworths and Visy for your cooperation, and thank you to all the individuals I spoke to who answered my questions to the best of their ability.

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23 thoughts

Great post Tammy – I am hesitant to ask this…but does this mean that any soft plastics, including plastic bags, that are collected by Coles and Woolworths (not REDcycle) are then collected and burned by Visy? If so, that is an interesting angle for Plastic Bag Free Victoria to look into.

I’m miffed to find out that all my careful shaking out of bread crumbs and cereals is all for nought. They companies who use plastic should have to pay a cost or use more environmentally friendly packaging. I am so impressed with your persistence Tammy. Unless we, as customers do massive amounts of research we really don’t know the origins or the fate of the plastic that is unfortunately such a part of western life. So, thanks so much for your professional, dedicated and considerate efforts to make this world a healthier place.

Thank you Natasha, I really appreciate you acknowledging how much effort went into this post for all our benefit. I absolutely agree with you. The people producing and using the plastic should take full responsibility for it. It’s not like they give the rest of us alternatives to be able to avoid it.

I agree with the above acknowledgment of your fine research, Tammy. When I first discovered that redcycle accepted the soft plastic I noticed that I felt a sense of relief that these soft plastics would no longer go to landfill. I knew that this response was tied in with a feeling that I was ‘off the hook’ in regards to dealing with this type of waste. I had to remind myself that this didn’t mean I could now buy goods sold in soft plastic without concern, that redcycle is best seen as a transition program that supports us through kicking the soft plastic habit totally. I am certainly not there yet and I very much appreciate that the redcycle people exist. It is inspiring that someone came up with the idea, put it into practice and that it has been so successful.

Well said Ruth. I think everybody feels a little bit of guilt about all the plastic they throw away, so the idea of it being recycled is definitely pleasing . It’s one small thing we can do whilst dealing with the bigger issues of getting companies to take responsibility for the packaging they produce.

Love the Redcycle story. Will now save my scrunchable plastic & take it to Newcastle (our closest centre) when we next head that way. On another matter – where we live the water is very hard so, to prevent my iron from clogging up, I buy “Thank you” water in a plastic 2 litre bottle. Any suggestions for how to “soften” water for this at home to eliminate this purchase in the future? We use the tap water for everything else but “bought water” really has lengthened the life of my iron.

Thanks for your report Tammy. Still no soft plastics recycling in South Gippsland 5 months on, so I can only hope it’s still coming. With regard to Visy, I can only assume from their cagey response that they’re burning the plastic – how they get away with that is beyond me.

I’m hoping too, but a couple of weeks ago I saw REDcycle respond to someone else with the comment ‘we’re still working on getting to Gippsland’ or something along those lines. Burning plastc and waste to create energy is common in some parts of the world and there’s a conference coming up (which unfortunately is way above my budget to attend) on the feasibility of increasing waste to energy (WtE) plants in Australia. It’s not a simple topic so i’m avoiding saying too much one way or the other at the moment, but i think we’re going to start hearing more about this and the pros and cons. It’s a shame that the public and most supermarket staff were led to believe the plastic was being recycled.

Following last nights report on the ABC about plastic recycling and such- it was claimed that Visy sends it’s collected plastic to China. As yet, unknown what it gets up to there! Red was doing a great job recycling soft plastics and we can only hope that all councils around the country buy their recycled garden seats and equipment so they can grow. Thanks for your article.

Hi Tammy,
So the plastic bags put in the recycling bins at supermarkets (not the red cycle ones) are burned for energy. What kind of environmental impact does burning them have, and is this better than if they were actually recycling them? I find it a bit misleading as I thought they were actually being recycled into other products, which is what I thought they did. More like repurposing.. and I’d like to know if this is actually worse than sending them to landfill too! I’d love to hear your thoughts 🙂

Burned for energy is what Coles says happens. Woolworths and Visy will not confirm what is happening to the plastic they collect – even the ABC couldn’t get answer as on Ep 2 of the War on Waste Australia.

Waste to energy technology (burning) has improved a lot in recent years so it might not be as bad as you think. It isn’t better than recycling but it is considered better than landfill. WtE would fall between recycling and landfill on the waste hierarchy because you are recovering the energy in the items, whereas in landfill you are wasting the resource because you are doing nothing with it. Recycling is better than recovering the energy because once burnt nothing else can be done with the materials. At least when you recycle the materials, there are still materials which can be used in the future. I hope that all makes sense.

Hi Tammy,
Thank you so much for your tenacious reporting and very insightful article. I too had thought all the plastic bags collected were recycled so it’s interesting to know that they are used for WtE instead.
In our Central Vic town of Clunes and the surrounding towns we have started a Boomerang Bag initiative to encourage less reliance on plastic bags at our local independent grocers.
Another initiative has been to turn the existing bags in circulation into Plarn (plastic yarn) to crochet lightweight plastic mats for homeless people to use.
Until Vic goes plastic bag free however we will always have issues with these bags.
Kudos to you on keeping us well informed, providing us with some fantastic investigative journalism and sharing your passion. Great blog. 😊

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Tammy Logan is the author of Gippsland Unwrapped, a blog committed to the pursuit of plastic and waste free living. Based in Gippsland, Victoria Tammy combines her experience in conservation biology and community engagement with her dairy farming roots, to deliver a humble and honest approach to plastic and waste free family life. Tammy wants to prove that living sustainably results in a more meaningful life and that as consumers, our buying power can be a strong force for positive change.